Issue Thirty-Two – Summer 2018

By Lorna Reese

This is the story of how SHARK REEF came to be and of the remarkable woman, writer and friend, who modeled what it is to be a writer.
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“Writers grow on the trees on Lopez,” Alie Smaalders announced to me in our early days together in the late 1990s. It did seem true. Memory is hazy at best but in my mind’s eye, I still see fellow writer Laurie Parker and me stopping on the wooden library steps

By Lita Kurth

By Sandra Kolankiewicz

The point is what allows the rest of the
arrowhead to enter the flesh of a
honey crisp apple set on the fence post
while you reach back over your shoulder toward
your quill, intent on splitting the fruit in

By Barbara Bloom

I dip into this tale of displaced children,
orphaned, waiting on their fortunes,
this summer of my own displacement.
The house has sold, my husband tells me,
his voice hollowed out by the phone.We have to be out in sixty days.

By Ellen Estilai

It was my need to belong that drove me to learn Persian. I prided myself on my command of the idiom. The secret to my steep learning curve was pretending. Make-believe was my major strategy. I was not content to merely memorize verb conjugations and the uses of the subjunctive. My tactic early on was to convince myself that I was Iranian. Even before I had the vocabulary, I had mastered the cadence of a Persian sentence. I

By Janet R. Kirchheimer

God dropped by last Tuesday morning, sat right down at my kitchen table, introduced Himself, and asked if I wanted to have coffee and some conversation. Believe me, I was thrilled He decided to come to my apartment, but all I could think about was why didn’t He remember that I don’t drink coffee. Perhaps God was using it in that generic way – let’s meet and have something to drink.

By Dwight Livingstone Curtis

They stopped for gas and lunch and to clean the windshield. The pump was in front of a bar called the Hitching Post in the town of Melrose. It was cold and the air from the Jeep’s heater had been getting cooler and cooler and Jack had three theories. One, there was a new air bubble in the heater core. Two, the core itself was bad and filling with rust as fast as he could flush it out. It wouldn’t be long before he needed to

By Cynthia Stock

he night I escaped the sinewy charms of Don Baker, I ran down the rocky dirt road from the drive-in, dodged behind garbage cans, and sidled into the recessed doorways of a strip mall to avoid being seen when Don drove by in his VW van. I walked home from that very scary date and swore to myself “Never again.”

A sophomore at Arizona State University, I thought I knew everything about college, men, and, oh yes, life.

By Sarah Johnson

Morris Louis lived from 1912 to 1962, a life that spanned two World Wars, a war on drugs, a war on love, a war on fruitcake, and a war on the abstract expressionists. Morris Louis painted in drips, thinning his paint and letting it run in rivulets down the canvas, pooling into a muddy brown on the drop cloth. It can have the effect of looking accidental. He is generally considered to be in the school of My Child Could Paint That.

By Michael H. Sato

In your final days you entered the stage in a body
Near skeletal, with skin the feel of parchment ready
To tear, with that smell of sullen sweetness—was it
Cheap perfume from the last user who took that prop
As his own to exit from what he called his life?